ntering the 21st century, the environment and contents related to the Internet have attained splendid development every day. With the increase use of the Internet, there have appeared a range of side effects including Internet addiction, which causes ...
ntering the 21st century, the environment and contents related to the Internet have attained splendid development every day. With the increase use of the Internet, there have appeared a range of side effects including Internet addiction, which causes abnormality to the physical and mental state and has negative influences on everyday life. But the countermeasures have just taken the first step.
According to the Internet addiction survey conducted by the government in 2005, the Internet addiction rates were higher among the teens(15.3%) than adults(12.6%). Various media have voiced their concern with adolescent Internet addiction by reporting all kinds of accidents and events caused by their problematic behavior out of Internet addiction. Thus this study set out to investigate the relationships between Internet addiction and the parenting behavior of the parents, with whom children make the first interaction in their lives.
In an attempt to understand the relationships between teens' Internet addiction and their parents' parenting attitudes, which make up the relational aspect of the family environmental factors, the study conducted a survey for total 504 fifth and sixth graders of an elementary school located in Yangsan City, Gyeongsangnam Province. The questionnaire contained the items asking about their parents' parenting attitudes as they perceived them and their Internet addiction. The measuring tools include the Inventory of the Parents' Parenting Behavior Perceived by Teens developed by Huh Myo-yeon(1999) to measure the parenting attitudes of the subjects' parents, as well as the Korean-Type Internet Addiction Inventory developed by the Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity & Promotion(Kim Cheong-taek et al., 2002) to measure the degree of their Internet addiction.
As a result, the elementary school students mostly had positive perceptions of their parents' parenting attitudes. They perceived affection, supervision, and rational explanation most in the descending order among the positive parenting attitudes. They perceived many different parenting attitudes types at the same time rather than just a single one.
Multivariate analysis was conducted to investigate the relationships between the parents' parenting attitudes and the students' gender. The results show that there was statistical significance. While the girls perceived they were under more supervision, the boys did they were more abused. There was a statistical tendency toward excessive expectations, too.
There was statistically significant difference in the relationships between the degree of the children's Internet addiction and gender. The overall Internet addiction rates were 37.7% with the potential risky users and highly risky users accounting for 16.8% and 16.9%, respectively. Cross tabulation was conducted to understand their Internet addiction in terms of seriousness according to gender. As a result, the degree differed much according to gender: there were more girls(26.1%) than boys(8.7%) in the group of potential risky users, while there were more boys(26.1%) than girls(6.2%) in the group of highly risky users.
Another round of multivariate analysis was conducted to examine the degree of the children's Internet addiction according to their parents' parenting attitudes. The group that perceived their parents' parenting attitudes negative showed a high level of Internet addiction, while the group that perceived their parents' parenting attitudes positive did a low level of Internet addiction. The relationships between the parents' parenting attitudes and the children's Internet addiction were examined in details with the Pearson's correlation coefficient. The results indicate that there were mostly significant correlations: while the positive parenting attitudes such as supervision, rational explanation, and affection had significant negative correlations with the children's Internet addiction, the negative parenting attitudes such as non-consistency, excessive expectation, excessive interference, abuse, and negligence had significant positive correlations with their Internet addiction.
In short, the parents' parenting attitudes perceived by the elementary school students led to significant difference according to the children's gender, which also caused significant difference in their degree of Internet addiction. And it turned out there were great correlations between how the children perceived their parents' parenting attitudes and the degree of their Internet addiction.